But if the GNU Project created an OS based on SerenityOS, would it be GNU/Serenity? 🤔
Spectacle8011
joined 1 year ago
I didn’t see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it’s not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
More than likely very few people own a pinephone, and the few that do don't read pinephone news. Thanks for posting this.
As for me, I'm not buying another pinephone/GNU+Linux compatible device until both the community and the manufacturer get their shit figured out. I bought the PInephone expecting it to one day become more useful to me, so I guess that's on me.
What's wrong with GNOME Boxes? My experience has been great for the past two years. Better than Virtualbox.
I've never used Ubuntu much, but that was interesting to know! Thanks for sharing.
I found this page on hardware enablement. My understanding is that new hardware isn't supported with old kernels, which older LTS releases are stuck with. So Ubuntu solves this problem by backporting newer drivers to the older kernel release.
That's quite an interesting way of making money. I guess if Dell wanted the newer drivers, they could just install a newer version of Ubuntu. But since they wanted more stability, they preferred that Canonical backport the fixes to an LTS release.
so Cannonical/Ubuntu stepped in, did it for cheap (~$1/machine)
What did they charge for?
I also had a pretty terrible experience with Fedora KDE not too long ago. Too many issues to count. In the end, I couldn't start a Plasma session from the display manager anymore so I gave up.
I really wanted to like Fedora, but...well, Fedora does not seem to like me. My experience on Arch KDE has been great. Like night and day. Still a few small bugs, but annoyances and not showstoppers. My experience with GNOME on Arch has been fantastic. Only one program was broken in GNOME that isn't in KDE. It makes me wonder why I ever tried to leave...
Disabling DXVK is the way to do it in Lutris. It's in the Runner Options tab for the game settings. If you create a new Wineprefix using WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/newprefix wineboot, it will use WineD3D (the D3DâžœOpenGL converter) by default. It's what Wine uses for all Direct3D APIs up to Direct3D 11. DXVK is a completely separate project to Wine, but Lutris and Proton bundle it and use it by default. Lutris is completely usable without Vulkan, despite the scary warning.
Oh, mobile. That's not a platform I use often. I'll defer to you on that!
All my media is in HEVC and I dont want to have to buy a video card for the server just so I can transcode it to Firefox when everything else can play HEVC out of the box.
As far as I know, Google Chrome did not support HEVC until last year. Safari is still the only browser with a software decoder for HEVC, but I'm pretty sure it was the only one with any form of decoding support for HEVC until 2022. Let me check caniuse!
So, it seems Samsung Internet (a browser I've never heard of, but presumably is the default on Samsung devices) also supported HEVC decoding for a long time, but aside from that, even hardware decoding support in Chrome is super recent: https://bitmovin.com/google-adds-hevc-support-chrome/
I was going to make a snarky comment about VP9 being good enough for Sisvel since they're trying to chase down Google for patent infringement royalties on HEVC, but yeah, transcoding all that media does not sound fun.
But on the other hand, a bug triager for Mozilla opened a new ticket for HEVC support 3 months ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842838
It's a strange ticket. No description at all, and why would they care about bugs for a video codec they don't support? It suggests Mozilla is going to do...something with HEVC sometime in the future. Shrug.
Edit: Did some more digging. See this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1853448
HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.
HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users' computer
HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.
Hooray for Windows users, I guess.
Profile switching is a big one for me.
You can change profiles by going to about:profiles. I find the way it's implemented in Firefox preferable to other browsers but I can see why others wouldn't.
You can also start up the profile switcher when you launch Firefox when launching it from the command-line with firefox -p.
Is this what you were talking about, or were you referring to something different?
but I would like to at least have the option for H.265 support.
Google Chrome only recently implemented this via hardware decoding. I imagine it's possible for Firefox to do the same thing without infringing on patents, as the browser doesn't implement a decoder this way; rather, they use the decoder implemented by NVIDIA et al.
I can only laugh when I consider Google announced they were dropping H.264 support 12 years ago: https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html
H.264 support only exists in Firefox by the grace of Cisco. Out of curiosity, why are you interested in H.265 support?
I'm familiar with the history of GNOME, and somewhat with Xamarin and Mono. While I have made that argument in the past, it was pointed out to me that the GNOME name was used to ride off the coattails of the popularity the GNU project had in the '90s, and they ended the association when it stopped being convenient for them.
(A GNOME developer pointed this out to me using this language; I could link you to the interaction, but it was on reddit)
I mean, both RHEL and Debian use Glibc which means the vast majority of the Linux applications running outside the cloud are calling into GNU code.
This also includes the proprietary NVIDIA driver, which only works with glibc.
Unlike GNU, his vision of the Linux desktop was populated by music players, spreadsheets, email / calendar programs, PDF viewers, and video editors.
I think this is a strange characterization of the GNU Project's goals. This is the Initial Announcement for the GNU Project:
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.
and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen.
Do you know something I don't? I don't think the GNU Project was against multimedia software; they were just focusing on the more fundamental stuff first.
The GNU Project's biggest contributions were when the kernel was in its infancy. The most major contribution is undoubtedly the GPL. Without it, Linux would not be where it is today. I think enough has been said on that subject, but it's what made RHEL billions. It's the philosophy of free software that has made so much of the programs today possible. It's incredibly important.
Obviously, we also have the GNU Project financially backing Debian GNU/Linux in its infancy. And while you say GNU wasn't involved in the GUI layer, that's not true. They worked on the free Harmony toolkit as a matter of high priority, and would have kept working on it if GNOME had not been so successful. Thanks to the success of another GNU project, GIMP, the GTK toolkit was able to be repurposed for general usage.
I don't think it's fair to discard contributions that never panned out like HURD and Harmony, because it shows GNU was actively involved in making the desktop better for everyone, which has really been its mission from the start. Maybe they're not "the backbone" of the desktop, but I think it's fair to say their biggest/most notable contributions have been to the desktop, not the server.
I don't contribute to the GNU Project because frankly, they don't do anything I consider worthwhile at the moment. I don't contribute to the Linux Foundation, either. I contribute to user-facing software I'm interested in, like Lutris, GIMP, and Kdenlive.
This news is notable because a mainstream proprietary software publisher has chosen to officially distribute using Flathub. I couldn't care less about Discord, but it says a lot about Flathub's mindshare. Proprietary publishers tend to pick AppImage, but this is the first publisher I know of that has chosen Flathub instead. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend.
That being said, Cassidy obviously had a very active hand in convincing Discord to adopt the Flatpak package.